| dc.description.abstract | Firms located in urban areas struggle with constraints on space, congestion, safety, pollution, and
varying stakeholder demands. These constraints place added pressure on the logistics of these
firms and will continue to amplify as populations in cities increase. Cities are major attractors for
people and businesses alike due to the diversity, economic activity, events, and overall greater
quality of life offered. For cities, events are a great revenue generator. Events are major population
attractors creating peaks in tourism and thus boosting the local economy.
Events are complex in nature and have similar characteristics to temporary projects. The
complexity occurs as a result of having short turn-around times, varying goods requirements and
unforeseen occurrences needing flexibility. Coupled with these prerequisites for event hosts, event
venues must also consider efficiency, sustainability, and client satisfaction for the overall success
of the event. The logistics of events and the impact on the city's existing infrastructure, while
important for local economies, is an under researched area. Hence it is critical to examine how
solutions presented in the world of urban logistics such as consolidation centres, can be applied to
local event venue firms to alleviate stressed filled peaks while keeping a focus on sustainability.
To examine the impact of a consolidation centre on an event venue firm a combination of two
frameworks can be utilised, the Actor-Resource-Activity (ARA) and Materials-Flow-Mapping
(MFM). The ARA framework looks at a firm as a network of interconnected parts while MFM
examines a specific process to evaluate the efficiency of each step. The application of the
frameworks on the case study firm, Svenska Mässan, will theoretically examine the potential of
integrating a consolidation centre on a larger scale and the effects on the firm’s employees. The
study results demonstrate the successful application of the frameworks to identify areas of
efficiency. | en |
